The Art Newspaper

Moniker: a spotlight on street art

A slick satellite fair has been launched by London-based urban art dealer Frankie Shea

By Anny Shaw and Robert Curran. From Frieze daily edition
Published online: 15 October 2010

Installation at Moniker

LONDON. Street art has grown up. And to mark its new-found status, Moniker, a slick satellite fair has been launched by London-based urban art dealer Frankie Shea to coincide with Frieze week (until 17 October). “Thousands of collectors are here, and we want to piggy back on Frieze,” said Shea at yesterday’s opening.

Works by big name street artists including Banksy and Ben Eine—whose work Twenty-First-Century City, 2008, was recently given by David Cameron to Barack Obama—can be snapped up for a few thousand pounds. Priced at £95,000, Banksy’s Flower Thrower, 2006, is the most expensive work on show and sold to London-based collector Michael Rushmore. But for collectors on a shoestring, limited editions can be purchased for £100.

Housed in the Village Underground—a warehouse located in Shoreditch in the East End—Moniker features eight galleries including Shea’s own space, Campbarbossa, Los Angeles’ Carmichael Gallery and New York’s Anonymous Gallery. There are also six project spaces including one by Eine, whose installation Ten has literally brought the urban into the fair by recreating East London’s Middlesex Street.

Brooklyn-based artist Kaws, who has a solo show opening at Emmanuel Perrotin in Paris in November, and whose work is collected by Takashi Murakami, is showing three works at Campbarbossa, each entitled Studio Baby, 2000, for £4,000. These “ad interruptions” consist of Kaws’ drawings of his trademark crosses pasted on to adverts depicting babies. Anonymous Gallery is selling his 2010 plastic Pinocchio sculptures for £300 apiece. These sculptures have been endorsed by Disney—a marker of his acceptance by the mainstream.

In the true spirit of street art’s punk attitude, Shea conceived of Moniker after finding it impossible to penetrate the more traditional art fairs. “I found it really difficult to break into the satellite fairs. You can’t get past the selection committees,” he said. While Paris, New York, Los Angeles and São Paolo embrace street art, it still has some way to go before it is fully accepted by the British art establishment. Many street artists and urban art dealers view the genre as just another branch of contemporary art, but it remains to be seen whether the new satellite fair can entice the Regent’s Park art crowd out to the more gritty environs of the East End.